Being Smart

All of my life, I've known I was smart. I could read before I went to kindergarten. In high school and college, I knew I was above average smart because I was in the honors programs. Then when I got a job, I thought I was smarter than everyone else because I was well-read and college educated. And that's when I learned how dumb I truly was.

People can be all kinds of smart. Street, common sense, mechanically, creatively, technologically and many many many other smarts. For example, I cannot balance my checkbook without the help of my computer and I've never been able to figure how much to tip. And there are people who can do that all in their heads, but have never read anything by Shakespeare. I also learned that the difference between someone who is truly smart and someone who thinks they're smart is this: the person who thinks they're smart claim to know everything even when they don't while the truly smart person will always say "I don't know."

And when I was on Jeopardy (we will eventually finish that story, I promise) I met several people who were freakishly smart in a way that I am only above average smart. These are the ones you see on the show who run the physics category, but can't answer any of the pop culture questions. On a show last year, the following question came up: "His guitar solo in 'Stairway to Heaven' was legendary" and NO ONE KNEW THE ANSWER! I was appalled. And the honors people I knew in college were so freakishly smart they could barely function outside of the classroom.

I was thinking about being smart today at work because during the course of the long, long day I realized that while there are many, many, many ways to be smart, there is only one way to be stupid. And to quote my friend Forrest, Forrest Gump, "that's all I'm gonna say about that."

THE SUPREME WISDOM OF THE QUEENOSHEBA

I'm so t-a-r-d tired I could f-a-r-t faint. I don't know what it means, it's something my dad always used to say. But that's the way I'm feeling right now.